Paul Maritz Wants to Sell You ‘Google in a Box’

Paul Maritz. Image: EMC

Paul Maritz wants to sell you “Google in a box.” That, he explains, is the aim of the Pivotal Initiative, the new operation he runs inside tech giant EMC.

No, the former Microsoft bigwig is not joining the search engine game. He wants to provide the world’s businesses with the sort of new-age software know-how that Google has long used behind the scenes to run its massive web empire, including not only its search engine but countless other online services. “What we’re trying to do is bring Google to the enterprise,” says Maritz, referring to the large businesses typically served by EMC, a company that made its millions selling big, beefy hardware devices that store online data.

Over the years, Google has built several sweeping software platforms that operate across a worldwide network of dirt-cheap computer servers. With names like the Google File System, Spanner, and Dremel, these platforms allow Google to juggle, use, and analyze an unprecedented amount of online information — and readily accommodate still more data as the web continues to grow.

In recent years, these tools have also inspired similar platforms at web giants such as Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter, including an open source platform known as Hadoop. “These web giants have the ability to store and process very large amount of data…. They know how to deploy and operate [software] atop of an underlying giant computer they call the cloud,” Maritz says. And now he wants to push this expertise to the rest of the world.

‘What we’re trying to do is bring Google to the enterprise.’

— Paul Maritz

It’s a notion that’s driving so many companies across the software market and beyond. The technologies pioneered by the likes of Google and Facebook — including not only software but hardware — are now trickling down to countless others. Multiple startups are selling Hadoop to businesses, and Facebook has bootstrapped an ever-growing community of hardware operations that can help companies adopt the sort of low-cost hardware that now underpins the world’s largest social network.

Maritz is reluctant to provide too much detail about the aims of the Pivotal Initiative, which was only launched this past December, after he stepped down as the CEO of VMware, another EMC operation. But he and others will kick off Pivotal’s mission on Feb. 25 when they unveil a “new Hadoop strategy.” Pivotal is basically a collection of existing groups from across both VMware and EMC, and one of those groups is Greenplum, which has long offered Hadoop alongside a somewhat similar platform for storing and analyzing large amounts of data.

But the Maritz’s vision extends beyond Hadoop. The Pivotal Initiative is named after Pivotal Labs, an outfit that EMC acquired last year. It was an unorthodox purchase — to say the least. Pivotal Labs was built to help businesses speed up and improve the way they build software through the use of “Agile development” techniques, and this doesn’t exactly jibe with EMC traditional hardware business. “I think the acquisition went through only because it was so unlikely,” Maritz jokes. But the aim, he explains, is to teach other businesses how to move as quickly as a Google and a Facebook.

“[The big web services] have learned how to develop new experience very rapidly on atop of their Big Data platforms,” Maritz says. “Facebook has made a fetish of saying that somebody can deploy a feature on its website on their first day of work.”

Yes, this is how it happens at Facebook. “You don’t have to wade in. You just dive in and start coding,” Facebook engineer Santosh Janardhan told us recently, while making a point of saying that so engineers will commit code to the website on their first day at the company. This rapid-fire approach lets the web giant evolve far more quickly than the traditional business, but it requires certain guidelines and attitudes that prevent engineers can completely wrecking the operations. Apparently, this is where Pivotal Labs come in. According to Scott Yara, the Greenplum founder who is now part of the Maritz operation, Pivotal has previously worked as a consultant for Google and Twitter.

Pivotal also has plans for Cloud Foundry, the sweeping open source software platform built under Maritz at VMware. But these are even less clear. “What we’ve done is give Rob Mee, the founder of Pivotal Labs, responsibility for Cloud Foundry,” Maritz says, “on the grounds that if it doesn’t work for his developers then there’s something wrong with Cloud Foundry that needs to change.”

Cloudry Foundry is a platform that lets a company build all sorts of software applications that readily scale across an enormous number of users. The idea is to give developers a means of creating such applications without having to worry about the raw computing resources that run beneath them. The platform has quite a pedigree. Its chief engineers included Mark Lucovsky and Derek Collison, who spent years building massive web services at Google — not to mention Lucovsky’s work on Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system. But it never seemed to find its place in the world.

Collison left the project last year, and he now says that the platform was unsuited to life at VMware — and that the market just wasn’t ready to embrace it. Collison has now founded a company called Apcera, which is trying to build a tool that goes several steps beyond Cloud Foundry.

Even before he left VMware, Collison says, the company was discussing spinning off Cloud Foundry into its own operation. As an open source software tool, he explains, it just didn’t fit with VMware’s existing business culture, which was geared toward selling the company’s virtual server platform, a proprietary piece of software. An open source business is about selling things around the software — not the software itself. “VMware is an extremely well-oiled machine in terms of its business model and its selling motion,” Collison says, “but that model didn’t necessarily match up for with an open source, platform-as-service type of technology.”

Collison says the platform is certainly better off inside a semi-separate operation such as Pivotal. The question is how it will dovetail with the rest of the Pivotal operation, but Maritz has at least picked the right metaphor. Google in a box is indeed the future.